Year: 2014

Just a holding post with a link for later.
(Something tweeted @romankrznaric by @iheu )

Watched Alice Roberts & Brian Cox (with Brian Blessed in tow) in Space, Time and Videotape last night after also watching Episode 5 of Cox’s Human Universe. All in the interests of research you understand, basically I’m not convinced this kind of “science” programming actually advances, or even has much to do with, real science. Interestingly in the Videotape program, the topic of good media-based science communication and education actually comes up as a topic, so it’s possible to use one as a case study of other other.

The 5th episode of Human Universe is about the future, and scientific knowledge we can use to predict it. Leaving aside personal issues of style for now, like previous editions, the mix of words per volume of dramatic visuals and sound-track is extremely low. It feels like maybe 2 sides of A4 actual content in the 40 minutes. Consequently we hear Brian stating the wonderful truths he holds, never explicitly admitting which are opinion (implicitly it’s all his opinion) or offering what science any are based on. No real explanation based on these and never doubting or suggesting even the existence of any serious alternative debate or conjecture, let alone airing any. The only evidence offered is typically technological (archetypically space-travel) and/or lavish graphical simulations (eg of Andromeda colliding with the Milky Way). Together these are simple to present and attention-grabbing, but not science. I already consider this very misleading. But note also, in spite of several references to scientific knowledge allowing us to predict the future, and to plan our human escape from the inevitable demise of our earth, there is no hint of limits to this predictability. Determinism is implied and the choice is simply ours. (Contrast this with Sagan in the later program, illustrating the chaotic nature of multi-body gravitation. Compare also with Burke “explaining” orbital mechanics of earth-moon space-flight – a “dab on the brake-pedal”. This stuff can be done well for the video-media generation.)

When it comes to the Videotape program, it’s interesting despite the fact that some real, scientific heroes are lined-up for the evening ahead, Cox refers to Alice and Brian as his heroes, somewhat devaluing any real scientific heroism I’d say, but anyway, some thoughts on the content of Videotape first:

Early on there is a classic example of conflating technology with science. There is a healthy focus on worlds out there, and the relative position of earth-bound humans in the whole scheme of things (so much more could be said here) but typically, as I say, they choose to show space-flight. A brainless meme. The spaceflight example shown is Apollo 13 – a wonderful story of the risks and heroism of human-geo-spatial exploration – (such a gripping human drama, they even made a feature film of it) – but not one mention of any science. (In fact the film is heroic for engineering more than science I’d say, but then I’m probably biased.) Later when we see James Burke kicking over the remains of the Apollo program (*), we hear him opine that the public thirst for novelty meant that public funding had to move on from supporting more of the same space travel, and that there were really no visible scientific explanations for the technology-assisted exploration programme anyway. So true.

It was excellent to see true examples of science media heroes: Bronowski, Feynman, Sagan, Moore and Burke all feature.

One highly spurious discussion arose. After showing a montage of three Bruno clips – including the impassioned Auschwitz moment, purely for its Cromwellian point on the contingency of believed knowledge – it is noted that he expresses opinion when referring to contentious debate between Gauss and Hayek.  The spurious discussion arising is a (typically tittering) mention of creationism vs evolution. That is not a scientific debate. There are plenty of scientific opinions and debates to be had about evolution, but creationism isn’t one of them. The Dawkins / Wilson differences – on the existence of group and/or multi-level evolutionary mechanisms above solely genes – simply denied as “woolly” by Dawkins – were highly topical, just this weekend. There is real scientific debate, even if Dawkins chooses dogmatic denial.

We see Bruno describing Newton on gravitation, and pointing out that whilst Newton did the elegant simplifying maths, he really did not offer any scientific explanation or hypothesis for gravity itself (nor even for mass). To this day, gravity remains unexplained and full of conjecture at all levels from the sub-quantum to the cosmic. Even with Higgs explaining mass differences in the electro-weak model, mass and gravity are largely unknowns – just look at CMBR patterns in echoes of the big-bang, dark matter & energy explanations of inflation, gravity waves research, and more. Genuinely exciting areas of scientific hypothesis and research.

Brian does admit to an explicit “marketing” agenda – banging the table in search of funding for science and for science media content – mixed in with the desire to educate they share. For me this conflation of science and marketing, in collusion with media’s own “viewing figures” agenda is pretty fundamental to what is currently wrong with the portrayal of science. There are a couple of points where Brian mentions the editorial policies of science programming, and whether he and Alice and fellow modern day science celebrity broadcasters are restricted from exposing differences of scientific opinion. Brian states several times that he sees debate on scientific disagreement as valuable.

For me this is the biggest chink of hope here – that this debate exists.

Earlier, a clip of Burke being interviewed by some (student intellectual?) audience is shown. The point suggested that Burke’s science programs were all hook (gimmicks) and no content (science or scientific explanation) – which incidentally Burke handles very well. This is a large part of my own agenda, though I see the mechanisms as more memetic, than either ignorance (incompetence) or conspiracy (intentional media marketing & science funding collusion) – to be better understood rather than simply criticised. Alice does pick-up again that the effort needed to create science media content and the practical and editorial constraints are considerable, possibly underestimated by their critics. Sadly when this topic arises Alice dismisses it (with more tittering) pointing out that the Burke’s intellectual inquisitor was wearing a cravat, so who was he to accuse of gimmicks. Oh how we laughed. That is not even close to a scientific argument – pure ad-hominem.

It’s ironic that the extremes of physics and the complexities of evolutionary mechanisms are where maximum speculation, contention and debate exists, and therefore where the maximum excitement for ongoing science resides, and yet our top media scientists operate under some editorial or self-imposed taboo (lest those of dogmatic faith spot a weakness) against exposing real science. Let’s ramp-up this debate. Hooks are good, but let’s up the real scientific content.

[Links will be added if debate is taken up.]

[Aside (*) – Earlier in the Burke montage we also see a slo-mo sequence of an Apollo blast-off. Always awe-inspiring, but enhanced by the overlay of two emotive passages from Carmina Burana. It was only 3 weeks ago I made a reference to this Carmina Burana meme, specifically as used by James Burke – in a eulogy / reading at my father’s funeral. A piece of music devalued by over-exposure out of context in popular media. The significance to my father – whose passion was historical maps and exploration on earth – was the human content and language of the piece. which resulted in the piece being very familiar in our household long before it became an overused media meme.]

Been debating this Register article shared by @jonmbutterworth, with others over on Facebook. As an engineer in the information management domain, I’m obviously very interested in and impressed by the IT challenge here.

100 Peta-Bytes so far,
27 PB in the past year, and
400 PB per year by 2023

Once collected, the possibilities for massively modular and parallel collaborative analysis, and alternative (say) neural network analyses, etc, … the sky’s the limit if the IT architecture supports it – hence the article. But of course that doesn’t make it “intelligent”. A human mind processes huge amounts of raw data daily, but it doesn’t store it as is, for later analysis. It is processed starting in real time experience with inferences, compressions, associations, and continues to be shuffled and re-shuffled between the conscious and subconscious and new associations thereafter. Refining the “remembered” world model we hold. But that’s not the really interesting thing here.

What is interesting is what this says about CERN / LHC / ATLAS Physics. Firstly it says nothing directly. It’s about an area of spin-off technology – unrelated to the particle physics – that benefits mutually from CERN needing it. (Think space-race and Teflon-coated pans.) But secondly, what it seems to suggest is something like this:

“We have so little understanding of how our physical theories explain reality, that we can’t decide in advance what we’re really looking for, so we’ll up the sample rate, record as much as we can, post analyse it, and hope we get lucky.”

And of course we will get lucky – some interesting and significant patterns will be found, interpreted and related to some aspects of the developing physical model. But this doesn’t change the basic point, that the physics is a long way from being completely explanatory of reality in these areas.

 

Just a quickie: People keep telling me that Sam Harris supports the idea that Free Will is an illusion.

I don’t support that view, and despite finding quite a few things to disagree with in what Sam Harris says, I generally consider Harris a heavyweight intellectually when it comes to philosophical thinking. People also tell me he cites Libet in support of his view. If he does he’s wrong, he’d be misinterpreting Libet (as many do of course), but something tells me people must be misunderstanding what Harris is saying. So I decided to check up this one point …

Indeed, in his book Free Will – immediately after the thought-provoking and ambiguous case-study on criminal responsibility which he uses as an introduction – he launches straight in with the simple, unequivocal, declarative statement:

Free will is an illusion.

His emphasis. QED surely? Well, no. A few sentence later he adds:

Free will is actually more than an illusion.

My emphasis. And a couple of paras later:

That we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions …. [is false].

My emphasis again. Agreed. For now, I rest my case.

Some, indeed many, maybe even most, aspects of our conscious will are illusory, but our free will is nevertheless real.

Indeed what Libet shows – think of a professional tennis player returning a serve – is that the crucial core of our conscious will is the power of free-wont over the major part of our decision processing, maximally delegated for reasons of efficiency and speed, to lower, more mechanistic, pre-programmed, biological functions. Permissive supervisory control, for those who prefer a cybernetic machine view. The permissive control is so consistent with other relationships between brain and mind functions too.

That mechanism of free-wont still requires a more explanatory, less reductionist description, but we shouldn’t doubt it exists.

[A quickie – so refs and links will be added as needed if anyone wants to discuss.]

Noticed this before, but prompted to share it …. The menu at the top of the Guardian Home Page typifies what’s wrong with science media reporting:

Science appears as a sub-category of news at the second level, not a higher level sibling of news, alongside, say Culture, Business, Technology and more.

Science “news” –  is predominantly about the process of science of interest to scientists and those with a particular interest in science – things suggested or published as a result of research or experiment. Without gaining the authority of a wider scientific community they are not in themselves new additions to the body of known science, but rather candidates competing for attention (and funding).

Still of wider interest for publication, sure, but better couched for what they are. Wonder how things got that way? Must check out other media channels.

[Post Note : Good one from Sabine Hossenfelder on Facebook. I know it’s only the Daily Mail, but some scary members of the public read this stuff:

I don’t know about the APS, but the German Physics Society allows every member to give a talk at their meetings, pretty much regardless of what the talk is about as long as at least the title has something to do with physics. They clump these people in the alternative session where they can discuss their conspiracy theories among each other. Somebody should have told the daily mail folks that a talk abstract on the website of a society page is not an indicator for scientific quality… It’s kinda funny though.

“UFO expert Nigel Watson, author of the Haynes UFO Investigation Manual, told MailOnline that Dr Brandenburg is not the first to suggest Mars was ‘murdered’ by nuclear explosions.”

Very funny, agreed, but it illustrates the point – that science requires “authority” not simply freedom of publication.]

I’ve picked-up where I left off with Thomas Nagel’s View From Nowhere, having put it aside to deal with some domestic priorities and then being captivated by Rebecca Goldstein’s latest.

So back to Nagel. After some good stuff about his problems with the unsatisfactory incompleteness of reductionist objectivity generally, he embarks on a review of various modern philosophical view points grappling with the subjective-objective dualism in various forms; idealisms, Kantian transcendental-realism, Wittgensteinian word-games, and so on. True to form, he opines:

I change my mind about [x]
every time I think about it,
and therefore cannot offer any view
with even moderate confidence.

Specifically here [x] is free-will / autonomy, but this is very much Nagel’s style – to claim progress only in identifying problems with accepted “objective” views, but feigning that he has no alternative to offer. Understandably, those “philosophy-jeerers”, who are his real targets, simply point to the lack of progress with philosophical answers as justification for their charge of irrelevance. Anyway, having now established that the exclusion of the subjective causes problems for explanations of free-will and ethical responsibility, he continues:

[The] sense of an internal explanation [for my autonomous action] exists – an explanation insulated from the external view which is complete in itself and renders illegitimate all further requests for explanation of my action as [simply] an event in the world. As a last resort, the libertarian might claim that anyone who does not accept an account of what I was up to as a basic explanation of action, is a victim of a very limited explanation of what an explanation is – a conception locked into the objective standpoint and which therefore begs the question against the concept of autonomy. Why aren’t these autonomous subjective explanations really just descriptions of how it seemed to the agent – before, during and after – to do what he did; why are they something more than impressions?

Of course they are at least impressions, but we take them to be impressions of something, something whose reality is not guaranteed by the impression. Not being able to say what something is, and at the same time finding the possibility of its absence very disturbing, I am at a dead end.

[…]

I have to conclude that what we want is something impossible, and that the desire for it is evoked precisely by the objective view of ourselves that reveals it to be impossible.

[…]

the interaction between objectivity and the will yields complex results which cannot necessarily be formed into a unified system. This means that the natural ambition of a comprehensive system of ethics may be unrealisable.

I’m much impressed again, as I was with Goldstein earlier, that Godel is telling us something here. If we exclude the subjective – to preserve objective consistency in our epistemology and ontology – we must accept an incomplete model of ethics. ie a realistic world model (including ethics as well as ontology and epistemology) must include or integrate the subject, not treat it as the other half of a dualism, the awkward part, best attacked with spurious charges of moral relativism, etc.

Particularly notable also that he exemplifies the “libertarian” as a victim of inadequate understanding. One of my issues with humanism in its more strident forms is the easy scientistic acceptance of determinism, with free-will as “an illusion”, combined paradoxically with the active personal interest in righting all forms of humanitarian wrongs against individual freedoms. Either humans have potential freedom, constrained by the misguided power of responsible others, or they don’t. Which is it?

I’m banging on these days about the centrality of “Love” in so many humanist messages, whether philosophical or religious. The original “common ground” on all sides.

Given my opinion of the moronic Russell Brand (***), about whom I blogged several times earlier in the year when he hit the media with his half-baked guff about “the hegemony of the political classes”, I’m not about to send him or his publisher £13.50 for a copy of his book on the subject, of which the reviews and counter-reviews so far only confirm my opinion. His main qualification to speak on the topic seems to be the vague visual resemblance to Che Guevara(*). But kudos to the creativity of the front cover (**):

We need to help change our politicians and political process through …. love …. not revolution.
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding, Russell?

(If we drop the R, the same Love exists in evolution.)
(**)And of course the same visual word game in the title was used by Ron Paul in the US in 2008.)

[Post Note : (*) And how did I forget his @RustyRockets twitter avatar is a Che-a-like anyway. Only went to look at the progress of the PARKLIFE! trolling campaign, which I’d not noticed since the original tweet a couple of days ago. Magic. And for posterior completeness, the original Craig Brown review and the original original Earthman Johann tweet.]

[Post Post Note : and Brand hits back with his own witty self-deprecating you-tube parody. Look, fair play to Brand for getting the question of proper democratic participation higher on the agenda, though with devolution and reform agendas all around us in recent years, it was already there. However fucked-up typical western democracies are, non participation cannot be a healthy message – unless you have a serious alternative to offer, and love is a perfectly serious alternative of course.]

[(***) Post Post Post Note – Fair play to Rusty Rockets.]

Continuing through Rebecca Goldstein’s Plato at the Googleplex and finding it sooooo good. In fact I’m loving it.

Despite two previous mentions [here][and here], I failed to mention that Larry Krauss is set up as the archetypal scientistic philosophy-(and theology)-jeerer. So, so true, and given the order of events last week – the culmination (so far) of my own long-running run-in with Krauss’ disingenuity. – restrained of me not to have mentioned it yet.  The “tumbleweed response” so far. The ignorance, The dishonesty. The horror.

Still not quite finished Googleplex, but after waxing lyrical about the three chapters majoring on love, I was quite simply blown away by the next chapter Socrates Must Die, hence the need to blog again before I’m finished. A mini textbook within the overall plot providing a wonderful readable summary of Plato’s world in historical context, the philosophy project he started in tribute to his first love, Socrates. No matter how much Plato you’ve read and interpreted yourself, I’d suggest Goldstein’s loving interpretation will be hard to beat. (And so many more Greek sources I’m going to have to find the time to read in a new light.)

For now a long quote from that chapter, to speak for itself:

The Euthyphro, which is one of Plato’s earlier dialogues and deals with the relationship between theism and morality – an issue still fraught for us today – [… takes place the same day while Socrates is … awaiting his turn to appear at the preliminary hearing on the charges against him … and it is Meletus who has brought the anti-Athens indictment against Socrates.]

Unwilling to squander any opportunity for meaningful discussion, he falls into conversation with a diviner-priest named Euthyphro, a priceless character whose sacerdotal vanity cannot be pierced. A self-declared expert on all things holy. Euthyphro has come […] to indict his own father on a charge of homicide for having accidentally killed a hireling, who had himself killed another worker in a fit of anger. Socrates is amazed to hear that Euthyphro is so secure in his moral certitude as to charge his own father. (The ancient Athenian codes of family loyalty make Euthyphro’s actions seem all the more questionable.) Euthyphro responds with the tell-tale conviction of the self-righteous.

Socrates immediately launches in, having his fun, declaring that Euthyphro alone can save him [Socrates] in this his moment of need, by instructing him on the nature of piety and holiness so that he can present himself as chastened to Meletus – though “Meletus, I perceive, along presumably everybody else, appears to overlook you.” With an interlocutor as deaf to sarcasm as to philosophical subtlety, Plato’s Socrates proceeds to formulate a line of reasoning that will prove to be of fundamental importance in the history of secularism, one that will be adapted by freethinkers from Baruch Spinoza to Bertrand Russell to the so-called new atheists of today, persuasively arguing that a belief in the gods – or God – cannot provide the philosophical grounding for morality.

Plato begins the inquisition innocently enough, with Socrates asking Euthyphro, “Is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it’s holy?”. Plato uses this question to pry apart the notion of an action’s being divinely ordained from its having moral worth. The argument is formulated in terms of “the gods”, but is without loss susceptible to the substituting of “God” for “the gods”. Plato’s argument, in a nutshell, is this: If God approves of an action, either he approves of it arbitrarily, for no reason at all, or else there is a reason for his approving it, so that it is not an arbitrary whim on God’s part but rather he has a reason for his approval, that reason being the independent moral worth of that which he approves. If the former is the case then how does this arbitrary whim, even if it is a divine arbitrary whim, confer moral value. How can something be good just because someone up there feels like calling it good, when, if he were of a different disposition or in a different mood, he could just as easily call the opposite act good? But if the latter is the case, then there is a reason for the divine normative attitude, and that reason is the reason both for God’s approval and for the moral worth of that which he approves.

That makes God’s approval, normatively speaking, redundant – he is, as we say today, a rubber stamp. In neither case – whether the approval is arbitrary or whether it is not – does the supernatural approval make any difference to whether an act is genuinely right or wrong.

What is still referred to as “the Euthyphro Dilemma” or “the Euthyphro Argument” remains one of the most frequently utilised arguments against the claim that morality can be grounded only in theology, that it is only the belief in God that stands between us and the moral abyss of nihilism. Dostoevsky may have declared that “without God all is permissible”, but Plato’s preemptive riposte, sent out to us across the millennia, is that any act permissible with God is morally permissible without him, making clear how little the addition of God helps to clarify the ethical situation.

The argument Plato has Socrates make in the Euthyphro is one of the most important in the history of moral philosophy. When it is joined with another of Plato’s claims, namely that a person’s action is virtuous only if he can supply a reason for its being so, the Euthyphro Argument demonstrates the need for moral philosophy. We humans must reason our way to morality or we will not get there at all.

[… …]

This moment in Socrates’ life, as Plato has rendered it, is sufficiently important to step away from it, and reflect. It has a bearing on the question that is always hovering over this book, as it traces the sources of philosophy as we know it, and that is the question of philosophy’s progress.

If one evaluates what the Greek philosophers did solely in terms of Thales and Co., then of course one will conclude something like “Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then ‘natural philosophy’ became physics and physics has only continued to make inroads.” But this is to focus on only one type of question the ancient philosophers posed to self-critical reason, the protoscientific questions that awaited the mature sciences. It is to ignore such questions as those that Plato has Socrates raising with Euthyphro […] It is to ignore Plato’s argument  that, since religious authority can’t answer these questions, we had better get to work on formulating the reasons that make right actions right and wrong actions wrong.

It is also to ignore the work that has since been done, not only on the normative questions of ethics but on the normative questions of epistemology, the work necessary to speak about rationality at all. It is to ignore the conclusions to which philosophy-jeerers freely help themselves, most certainly when they speak in the name of rationality.

When the philosophy-jeerers are also scientific, the their jeering frequently takes on religion as well as philosophy. Typically they do not differentiate between philosophy and theology. Anything that isn’t science is philosophy/theology. Lawrence Krauss, whom I keep mentioning only because he conveniently articulated a viewpoint that many scientists share, lumps philosophers and theologians together.

Such jeerers should pause and reflect on this moment of the Euthyphro.

And there is so much more to recommend.

Clearly that passage on why philosophy matters even where physicists believe they already have all bases covered is what failed to materialise when Larry Krauss talked with Mary Midgely and Angie Hobbs in “Philosophy Bites Back” at How The Light Gets In earlier this year.

More on Spinoza and sub specie aeternitatus embracing the whole cosmos.

More on re-admitting the poets to Plato’s domain.

More on the inescapable “elitism” angle that, when it comes to moral reasoning, not all men are created equal. Inescapable in the sense I concluded this independently before and always struggle to introduce the concept into more naive conversations about the mechanics of free democracies.

Friday I’m in love, with wisdom (again) and talking of Goldstein and love.